We cannot allow anything that’s called ‘national defense’ to justify any and all spending. We need to be very, very careful that we don’t overspend and say, ‘Oh, that’s defense,’ when perhaps it isn’t. – Grover Norquist
The American taxpayers are a powerful force. They don’t want their taxes raised. Obama and the Democrats have a fight with the American people, not with me. – Grover Norquist
Spending should be transparent. All spending by the Pentagon should be online. Every check. Exceptions should be made for legitimate national security issues. But military and civilian pay and retirement benefits are not state secrets. This has already been done in many state governments. – Grover Norquist
Immigration is America’s No. 1 economic asset. The rest of the world can’t do that. We can have every smart person we want, every high-skilled person we want. – Grover Norquist
My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub. – Grover Norquist
Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun. – Grover Norquist
As long as we’re focused on spending, there are only two ways to do that: One is spend less, and Democrats have no solutions for that. Or we have pro-growth policies that make the economy grow so the dead-weight cost of government becomes a smaller percentage of the economy and therefore less expensive. – Grover Norquist
The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit. The deficit is the symptom of the disease. – Grover Norquist
What’s hurting the U.S. economy is total government spending. The deficit is an indicator that the government is spending so much money that it can’t even get around to stealing all of the money that it wants to spend. But the tip of the iceberg is not what hit the Titanic – it was the 90 percent of the iceberg under water. – Grover Norquist
The important thing about tax reform is you make the tax code less complicated, easier for people to understand. – Grover Norquist
Obama is a guy who claims to be unaware that there was a Tea Party, a guy that’s detached from the country. – Grover Norquist
If the parties would brand themselves the way Coke and Pepsi and other products do so that you knew what you were buying, it had quality control. I vote for the Republican. He or she will not raise my taxes. I’ll buy one. I’ll take that one home. – Grover Norquist
Someday I hope Americans will not believe that anyone had to spend his or her days fighting for limited government because everyone they know wants maximum freedom and minimum statism. – Grover Norquist
Tax increases slow economic growth. Why would you raise taxes? We need to reform spending, the tens of trillions of unfunded liabilities can never be funded by tax increases, that can only be fixed by reducing spending. – Grover Norquist
Look, the center right coalition in American politics today is best understood as a coalition of groups and individuals that on the issue that brings them to politics what they want from the government is to be left alone. – Grover Norquist
People who say that there’s a vote within the Republican Party that moves against immigrants is just factually not accurate. – Grover Norquist
Americans for Tax Reform is a national taxpayer organization dedicated to opposing any and all tax increases. We work at the national, state and local level for lower taxes, less government spending and limited government. – Grover Norquist
The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat. – Grover Norquist
Obama wants to take the individual small business tax to 44 percent, and the corporate rate – he says – down to 28 percent or whatever. But that really damages the small businesses. And it doesn’t make us competitive. You got to take them both down to 20, because state and local corporate taxes are 5 percent. – Grover Norquist
Conservatives should insist that defense spending be examined with the same seriousness that we demand in examining the books of those government agencies that spend taxpayer money in the name of welfare, the environment, or education. – Grover Norquist
If you raise taxes, it won’t reduce the deficit. The other team will simply spend the resources. – Grover Norquist
A lot of young people just starting out unskilled, as all Americans do when they’re born here, come to this country, and so the business community is for immigration. Big businesses, small businesses, high-tech, low-tech, the communities of faith, and the Republican leadership. – Grover Norquist
The question is: How do we reduce spending from 25% of GDP, which is where Obama put us? The focus is on total government spending. Can we bring it down, in a reasonable and politically acceptable way? That’s what the Paul Ryan plan does. It puts us on a gradual reform path to reducing the size of government. – Grover Norquist
Everyone would have bigger and safer cars if they didn’t have those CAFE standards: corporate average fuel economy. – Grover Norquist
We need a Federal government that does what the government needs to do and stops doing what the government ought not to be doing. – Grover Norquist
When I was younger, I thought of myself as a Nixon Republican because he was the anti-Communist. – Grover Norquist
